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Monday, September 10, 2012

When was the
last time you drove down a road or through a part of town that you hadn't visited for awhile?All of a sudden you
notice something new.“When did that pop
up?” you wonder.Cities like Calgary are like
that.Things, buildings, stores, houses
are forever popping up, seemingly overnight.

Popville by Anouck Boisrobert and Louis Rigaud
(307.76 BoP 2010 PIC BK), is a 3- dimensional exploration of how a landscape
grows from a single building down a single road in the countryside. Then come two roads and a few more buildings
and a few less trees. Each flip of the
page shows increasing growth, more roads and buildings, growing outward into a
rural area. The last page is a fully
developed urban landscape showing a network of roads and railroad tracks for cars
and trains, various buildings (skyscrapers, industrial, residential, and a church),
green spaces, and even a series of telephone poles with string ‘wires’. The implication, of course, is that there are
more people as well.

The really
delightful part is the pop up aspect of the book. The original building is in the centre of the
book on the spine crease. The clever die cast design allows for everything
else to grow up around it, ‘popping’ up through cut squares beside it, also
along the spine of the book. Mostly, we
look down on to this changing landscape giving us a different, aerial
perspective. When we look closely, at
eyelevel we see the fronts of the buildings but these are without much detail. The
illustrations are fairly stylized with primary colours.

At the back
of the book are questions that asks the reader to consider what is involved
when a city grows, such as more people requiring more
services and infrastructure.

An
interesting book that will work well with elementary grades and up into the middle
grades.

Today is Nonfiction Monday and hosted at Books Together. Lots of great children's literature to discover today.

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About Me

I am the reference coordinator at The Doucette Library of Teaching Resources, a curriculum library in the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary.
I love connecting education students and teachers with engaging and exciting resources for classroom teaching. I believe that resources that get me excited (or those that get you excited) are the ones with the best potential to get kids interested in learning about - well, everything. Finding those books that connect to the real world are the ones I enjoy promoting the most.